Assume that God exists. Normally we do this anyway, but I emphasize it for a moment. Use, "God exists," as an explicit premise in an explicit basic argument. That argument is this: if God exists, history has a divine pattern to it, and apocalyptic writings in general are images of this pattern.
Inasmuch as God is infinitely good, we can expect that all the best things ever done--in fact, all things good ever done--are directly or indirectly but substantially supported by God's power. Thus, from a fairly general religious premise--one common to Islam even, for example--we can infer the primacy of Christ in religious history, for His presence in time marks the most important moral transition, on the transepochal scale, in our recorded history. And regardless of the sins of His more wayward and latterly disciples, His moral revolution has at least often in the background anyway had a great impact on the moral development of the world.
But now if God is the best of all things, and sin His absolute foe, then the greatest sins ever committed, such that they were linked by a subtle layer of meaning to be read into the course of history, would represent the final evils of the apocalyptic narratives of the Christian faith--the Adultress of Babylon, the Beast, the False Prophet, the Dragon, and the angel of Death and Hell.
So, what have the worst individuated sins in history been? Sometimes, we look at a set of actions by different people over sustained time as a bunch of small actions that add up, somehow, into something that can be thought of as a single action. So we look at institutional crimes like the Nazi death camp system as a single crime, not just a blanket-term for a bunch of more divisible offenses. For the division of guilty labor, we have the theory of command responsibility and the like; for the thing for which so many people are being held responsible, we have the philosophy of complex activity.
In light of that, there are certain events that can be looked at as single actions of a large enough scope, in absolute or proportional terms, to merit the title of some of the worst crimes known from history. Or there might be such things; and if there should prove to be these things, then I wonder whether the following hypothetical list should prove to overlap said hypothetical proof?
There probably should be more examples, but this is a start. Moreover, crimes besides murder might also be suggested as relevant to such a list.
Inasmuch as God is infinitely good, we can expect that all the best things ever done--in fact, all things good ever done--are directly or indirectly but substantially supported by God's power. Thus, from a fairly general religious premise--one common to Islam even, for example--we can infer the primacy of Christ in religious history, for His presence in time marks the most important moral transition, on the transepochal scale, in our recorded history. And regardless of the sins of His more wayward and latterly disciples, His moral revolution has at least often in the background anyway had a great impact on the moral development of the world.
But now if God is the best of all things, and sin His absolute foe, then the greatest sins ever committed, such that they were linked by a subtle layer of meaning to be read into the course of history, would represent the final evils of the apocalyptic narratives of the Christian faith--the Adultress of Babylon, the Beast, the False Prophet, the Dragon, and the angel of Death and Hell.
So, what have the worst individuated sins in history been? Sometimes, we look at a set of actions by different people over sustained time as a bunch of small actions that add up, somehow, into something that can be thought of as a single action. So we look at institutional crimes like the Nazi death camp system as a single crime, not just a blanket-term for a bunch of more divisible offenses. For the division of guilty labor, we have the theory of command responsibility and the like; for the thing for which so many people are being held responsible, we have the philosophy of complex activity.
In light of that, there are certain events that can be looked at as single actions of a large enough scope, in absolute or proportional terms, to merit the title of some of the worst crimes known from history. Or there might be such things; and if there should prove to be these things, then I wonder whether the following hypothetical list should prove to overlap said hypothetical proof?
1. The Nazi death camp system
To my knowledge, no other regime ever turned mass murder into an industry. They may have had vast and efficient systems of killing, often by military means; but to have basically factories for destroying human life, well, I don't remember ever finding clear evidence of any other evil government, even the Soviets for instance, having such a vicious setup in place. Maybe around 4,000,000 people died in the death camps, around 3,000,000 or so of them Jews (the other 3,000,000 Jewish dead from the Holocaust perishing from other causes, e.g. imposed starvation and mass execution by firing squads or poison vans).
I think I read one time that the idea of a Third Reich was a parody of the idea of the Third Age that the Catholic monk Joachim of Fiore came up with. This would have been the Age of the Spirit; and attributing to the demons the acts of the Holy Spirit is the eternal sin. So it might be that the entire Nazi regime was essentially founded on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which would just go to show us exactly what happens when someone actually commits the eternal sin. Certainly, Hitler would have sympathized more with the intolerance towards Jews that had arisen in Joachim's time, than with the relatively tolerant and at any rate peaceful attitude towards Jews expressed in Joachim's own theories (e.g. Joachim says that the Antichrist will not be a Jew, which was often claimed, but rather that an evil pope would serve for this figure).
2. The flash flood in 1938 China
One of the reasons the communists were able to take over China is because the previous government was just as sinister as Mao's circle would end up being. To prove this, the KMT regime massacred millions of civilians within their own country, enslaved millions of others to death, magnified famines and engaged in random vindictive reprisals. However, in 1938, they committed not only their worst deed, but one of the worst deeds of anyone in all known history. For to fend off the path of the Japanese invasion, they suddenly destroyed a major dam, spontaneously drowning almost 900,000 of their own people. No action on this small of a scale has killed so many people either before or since. Thus, in a way, this is the cardinally greatest act of mass murder ever.
3. The Chinese communist famine
In absolute numbers, the largest famine known: 27,000,000 to 38,000,000 dead, due to the unjust rule of the Chinese Communist Party. This alongside executions and slave-labor camps with sizable mortality rates.
4. The Soviet inauguration of the global militant communist movement
Although cumulatively the Soviet Union's government killed an abnormally large number of people in unjust ways, even the Gulag Archipelago has as best-supported a range of about 1,600,000 to 16,000,000 or so victims. For the duration of the GA compared to the duration of the Nazi death camp system shows that the latter was much more destructive than the former, for its rate of victim production was much higher. And in light of the famine described in (3), the USSR's starvation-genocide in Ukraine becomes less anomalous as an expression of communist malice. The gestalt of Soviet evil, though, was such that as this spiritually infected much of the Earth, it inspired a vast tide of slaughter possibly without numerical equivalence in history. For example, the North Korean and Red Ethiopian regimes combined murdered or are murdering several million people over the courses of their existence. The Vietnamese, Yugoslavian, and Romanian communist systems are liable to have killed millions more, and not in battle I mean. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia organized one of the most diabolically absurd genocides ever, killing millions. In short, by provoking and supporting so much, and even close to all, of this, and more, the Soviet regime was accomplice beyond all others on this list to a greater number of mass murders than any other nation has proven, including the United States for instance.
5. British famines in India
At least one of them, anyway. To the degree that these resulted from British imperial oppression of the Indian economy, results caused by a degree of malice aforethought, if quite callous in form: to such an extent these famines can be seen as murderously brought about by the British Empire, and in both absolute numbers as well as proportion to population lost, these may rival or even exceed communist handiwork in China.
6. Mongolian city massacres
The three largest urban slaughters perpetrated by ground forces in the 20th Century were probably foremost the Rape of Nanjing, secondly the Rape of Warsaw (by the Nazis, after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto), and last the Rape of Dacca (I think is the spelling; a major city in Bangladesh, anyway). In these bloodbaths, 300,000 & 200,000 & 150,000 or so civilians died, respectively. But the elder Khanate armies are said to have killed anywhere from 400,000 in one Chinese city, to 2,400,000 somewhere in the Middle East, and so on and on between these two orders of magnitude. Although the precision of these numbers is debatable, they do suggest that at least once, the Khanate military massacred something like a million people in one city during at least one campaign--and there is little to no evidence of any other military, even Rome's, performing such an atrocious act.
7. The Desolation of Abomination
So for some unhealthy reason, some Christians have often thought the slaughter of the Jews in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. was revenge against the Jews for the death of Christ. Waiving that menacing interpretation aside, it appears that by killing anywhere from tens of thousands to 1,100,000 people in this massacre, the Roman Empire in proportion to world's population and in absolute numbers inflicted one of the ultimate massacres on the moral history of the Earth. For in absolute numbers, the 600,000 cited by Tacitus, IIRC, is not far away from what can plausibly said of the Mongolian invasions.
8. The corruption of the Christian religion
As this has been a periodic constant, it is utter malevolence when a moral revolution is in any part hijacked by persons of ill intent, to further the causes of evil will. As a particular example, perhaps the Albigensian crusade most starkly demonstrates the savagery of Christian churches when they are at their darkest.
9. Spanish colonial policy in the Americas
For causing, if not altogether voluntarily on the part of the perpetrators, one of the ultimate population collapses in history.
10. The American war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos
The US used 10,000,000 tons of bombs during this war. All factions together during WWII used 2,000,000. The napalm used in the Vietnam War was at 400,000 or so tons, compared to 14,000 by the US on Japan earlier. So as you can imagine, the American military campaign in the Vietnam region was the most focused act of pure destruction in all military history--the equivalent to nuclear war over thousands of miles of territory, in an area not much larger than New York and two or three adjacent states. As an emissary of the angel of Death who is cast into the Lake of Fire after the Devil (who we usually think of as the final enemy in the Christian scheme of things), the US, then, surely did one of the most depraved things known to have ever been done, incarnating a sinful will to oblivion in the form of the war.
11. The execution of Christ
It is wrong to execute an innocent man--in fact, if certain moral theories might be correct, it might be wrong to execute anyone at all. As Christ was Who He was, unjustly killing Him would be in a metaphysical sense one of the ultimate crimes possible. As an antitype both of past martyrdoms as well as the future martyrdom of Jerusalem itself, the Crucifixion as inflicted by Rome--another servant not of Satan but of sheer destruction--thus becomes a sin at the core of the struggle in eternity between good and evil. But because Christ is able to forgive this extreme sin against Him, and vindicate Himself against death itself even, He opens the door to the forgiveness of all other sins by His grace: for if He could forgive the murder of God, He could very well forgive everything else under the sun, if only we accepted His friendship. This does not mean, though, that humanity ought to have taken Christ's life on that special Day, but only that, once humanity was polluted by social sin, it would lead to such a taking of a life at some point. Thus the sin of murdering God is not justified by the role of the Lord's death in the Atonement, for this is no more than an expression of the deeper, original sin of the world, the thing with which the Savior did battle. He had to accept His death in the sense that He had to accept that becoming Incarnate in the Fallen realm would lead to His murder at the hands of the Fallen themselves. He died for us, as a ransom, in the sense that He died in place of all the others who would have died worse deaths had He not made the choice He did at that point in time. In the eternal scheme of things, no matter the scale of the Church's own Fall down the road, the fact of Christ's victory over sin means that His presence in history has led to more good than evil, even if primarily in the abstract domain of possibilities shifted around by the unique ripples sent out by the Son of Man's free will.
To my knowledge, no other regime ever turned mass murder into an industry. They may have had vast and efficient systems of killing, often by military means; but to have basically factories for destroying human life, well, I don't remember ever finding clear evidence of any other evil government, even the Soviets for instance, having such a vicious setup in place. Maybe around 4,000,000 people died in the death camps, around 3,000,000 or so of them Jews (the other 3,000,000 Jewish dead from the Holocaust perishing from other causes, e.g. imposed starvation and mass execution by firing squads or poison vans).
I think I read one time that the idea of a Third Reich was a parody of the idea of the Third Age that the Catholic monk Joachim of Fiore came up with. This would have been the Age of the Spirit; and attributing to the demons the acts of the Holy Spirit is the eternal sin. So it might be that the entire Nazi regime was essentially founded on blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which would just go to show us exactly what happens when someone actually commits the eternal sin. Certainly, Hitler would have sympathized more with the intolerance towards Jews that had arisen in Joachim's time, than with the relatively tolerant and at any rate peaceful attitude towards Jews expressed in Joachim's own theories (e.g. Joachim says that the Antichrist will not be a Jew, which was often claimed, but rather that an evil pope would serve for this figure).
2. The flash flood in 1938 China
One of the reasons the communists were able to take over China is because the previous government was just as sinister as Mao's circle would end up being. To prove this, the KMT regime massacred millions of civilians within their own country, enslaved millions of others to death, magnified famines and engaged in random vindictive reprisals. However, in 1938, they committed not only their worst deed, but one of the worst deeds of anyone in all known history. For to fend off the path of the Japanese invasion, they suddenly destroyed a major dam, spontaneously drowning almost 900,000 of their own people. No action on this small of a scale has killed so many people either before or since. Thus, in a way, this is the cardinally greatest act of mass murder ever.
3. The Chinese communist famine
In absolute numbers, the largest famine known: 27,000,000 to 38,000,000 dead, due to the unjust rule of the Chinese Communist Party. This alongside executions and slave-labor camps with sizable mortality rates.
4. The Soviet inauguration of the global militant communist movement
Although cumulatively the Soviet Union's government killed an abnormally large number of people in unjust ways, even the Gulag Archipelago has as best-supported a range of about 1,600,000 to 16,000,000 or so victims. For the duration of the GA compared to the duration of the Nazi death camp system shows that the latter was much more destructive than the former, for its rate of victim production was much higher. And in light of the famine described in (3), the USSR's starvation-genocide in Ukraine becomes less anomalous as an expression of communist malice. The gestalt of Soviet evil, though, was such that as this spiritually infected much of the Earth, it inspired a vast tide of slaughter possibly without numerical equivalence in history. For example, the North Korean and Red Ethiopian regimes combined murdered or are murdering several million people over the courses of their existence. The Vietnamese, Yugoslavian, and Romanian communist systems are liable to have killed millions more, and not in battle I mean. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia organized one of the most diabolically absurd genocides ever, killing millions. In short, by provoking and supporting so much, and even close to all, of this, and more, the Soviet regime was accomplice beyond all others on this list to a greater number of mass murders than any other nation has proven, including the United States for instance.
5. British famines in India
At least one of them, anyway. To the degree that these resulted from British imperial oppression of the Indian economy, results caused by a degree of malice aforethought, if quite callous in form: to such an extent these famines can be seen as murderously brought about by the British Empire, and in both absolute numbers as well as proportion to population lost, these may rival or even exceed communist handiwork in China.
6. Mongolian city massacres
The three largest urban slaughters perpetrated by ground forces in the 20th Century were probably foremost the Rape of Nanjing, secondly the Rape of Warsaw (by the Nazis, after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto), and last the Rape of Dacca (I think is the spelling; a major city in Bangladesh, anyway). In these bloodbaths, 300,000 & 200,000 & 150,000 or so civilians died, respectively. But the elder Khanate armies are said to have killed anywhere from 400,000 in one Chinese city, to 2,400,000 somewhere in the Middle East, and so on and on between these two orders of magnitude. Although the precision of these numbers is debatable, they do suggest that at least once, the Khanate military massacred something like a million people in one city during at least one campaign--and there is little to no evidence of any other military, even Rome's, performing such an atrocious act.
7. The Desolation of Abomination
So for some unhealthy reason, some Christians have often thought the slaughter of the Jews in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. was revenge against the Jews for the death of Christ. Waiving that menacing interpretation aside, it appears that by killing anywhere from tens of thousands to 1,100,000 people in this massacre, the Roman Empire in proportion to world's population and in absolute numbers inflicted one of the ultimate massacres on the moral history of the Earth. For in absolute numbers, the 600,000 cited by Tacitus, IIRC, is not far away from what can plausibly said of the Mongolian invasions.
8. The corruption of the Christian religion
As this has been a periodic constant, it is utter malevolence when a moral revolution is in any part hijacked by persons of ill intent, to further the causes of evil will. As a particular example, perhaps the Albigensian crusade most starkly demonstrates the savagery of Christian churches when they are at their darkest.
9. Spanish colonial policy in the Americas
For causing, if not altogether voluntarily on the part of the perpetrators, one of the ultimate population collapses in history.
10. The American war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos
The US used 10,000,000 tons of bombs during this war. All factions together during WWII used 2,000,000. The napalm used in the Vietnam War was at 400,000 or so tons, compared to 14,000 by the US on Japan earlier. So as you can imagine, the American military campaign in the Vietnam region was the most focused act of pure destruction in all military history--the equivalent to nuclear war over thousands of miles of territory, in an area not much larger than New York and two or three adjacent states. As an emissary of the angel of Death who is cast into the Lake of Fire after the Devil (who we usually think of as the final enemy in the Christian scheme of things), the US, then, surely did one of the most depraved things known to have ever been done, incarnating a sinful will to oblivion in the form of the war.
11. The execution of Christ
It is wrong to execute an innocent man--in fact, if certain moral theories might be correct, it might be wrong to execute anyone at all. As Christ was Who He was, unjustly killing Him would be in a metaphysical sense one of the ultimate crimes possible. As an antitype both of past martyrdoms as well as the future martyrdom of Jerusalem itself, the Crucifixion as inflicted by Rome--another servant not of Satan but of sheer destruction--thus becomes a sin at the core of the struggle in eternity between good and evil. But because Christ is able to forgive this extreme sin against Him, and vindicate Himself against death itself even, He opens the door to the forgiveness of all other sins by His grace: for if He could forgive the murder of God, He could very well forgive everything else under the sun, if only we accepted His friendship. This does not mean, though, that humanity ought to have taken Christ's life on that special Day, but only that, once humanity was polluted by social sin, it would lead to such a taking of a life at some point. Thus the sin of murdering God is not justified by the role of the Lord's death in the Atonement, for this is no more than an expression of the deeper, original sin of the world, the thing with which the Savior did battle. He had to accept His death in the sense that He had to accept that becoming Incarnate in the Fallen realm would lead to His murder at the hands of the Fallen themselves. He died for us, as a ransom, in the sense that He died in place of all the others who would have died worse deaths had He not made the choice He did at that point in time. In the eternal scheme of things, no matter the scale of the Church's own Fall down the road, the fact of Christ's victory over sin means that His presence in history has led to more good than evil, even if primarily in the abstract domain of possibilities shifted around by the unique ripples sent out by the Son of Man's free will.
There probably should be more examples, but this is a start. Moreover, crimes besides murder might also be suggested as relevant to such a list.
